Posts Tagged ‘Franco’

As to your question concerning the meaning of physical suffering and its relation to mental and spiritual healing: Physical pain is a necessary accompaniment of all human existence, and as such is unavoidable. As long as there will be life on earth, there will be also suffering, in various forms and degrees. But suffering, although an inescapable reality, can nevertheless be utilized as a means for the attainment of happiness. . . . Suffering is both a reminder and a guide. It stimulates us to better adapt ourselves to our environmental conditions, and thus leads the way to self-improvement. In every suffering one can find a meaning and a wisdom. But it is not always easy to find the secret of that wisdom. It is sometimes only when all our suffering has passed that we become aware of its usefulness.

(In a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, 29 May 1935 to an individual believer)

Architecture

With both my reading and the anxieties about our steward’s missing cousin, the positive side of the experience on board ship was becoming overshadowed by darker realities.

We really needed our excursion into Pisa, not simply to get off the boat but also for the uplifting nature of what we found there, and I’m not talking about the Leaning Tower. We knew that we would not be able to go up the tower anyway. To do that we would have needed to book in advance. However, that was not a problem as there was so much else to see.

It was a short drive of 30 minutes from Livorno where our ship had docked. The coach parked in the bus station and the guide escorted us to the Square of Miracles or Cathedral Square.

We found the ticket office after retracing our steps the entire length of the square, and booked ourselves to go into the three main buildings in the square: the Baptistry, the Cathedral and the Cemetery, the latter rather unusually being a building enclosing a burial site. As the tour guide had said en route, those three buildings encapsulated birth, life and death.

The tall and circular baptistry was quite a surprise to me. The guide had explained why it was separate from the cathedral. At that period of history in 1363 the belief was that the unbaptized could not enter a church so baptism had to take place somewhere else than the cathedral. Even so, I was puzzled as to why such an extremely lofty space, with its font of octagonal design, should have been constructed for such a simple ceremony. It is apparently the largest baptistry in Italy. Because of the underlying sand, the Baptistry leans 0.6 degrees toward the cathedral – rather appropriate really.

Despite my bafflement, or perhaps partly because of it, the Baptistry was a good preparation for the very different experience of the Cemetery or Campo Santo, its rebuild completed in 1464. It may seem bizarre to have dislocated the natural order of things by visiting the Cemetery before the Cathedral and immediately after the Baptistry. It seemed to make sense at the time because of the long queue waiting to enter the Cathedral.

Although the sarcophagi and the stone slabs or plaques marking a grave were striking in themselves, I found myself captivated by the frescos high along the walls. The first had been applied in 1360, the last about three centuries later. On 27 July 1944, a bomb fragment from an Allied raid started a fire.The frescos had had to be removed due to extensive fire damage to the building. They were now in the process of being transferred back into place.

Here was yet another complex message about the human predicament. The frescos captured both the faith in Christ of their original creators and a very real sense of the thriving communities that effectively financed and admired them. Their near-destruction captured the fragility and transience of all things, as well as the role in their vulnerability of human discord. The clash of ideologies is still with us and now it has once more a quasi-religious twist reminiscent of what lay in store for England barely 70 years after the Cemetery building had been completed.

It was a more subtle message than the amphitheatre’s, but a powerful one none the less.

The Cathedral was a more conventionally extravagant celebration of worship and did not detain us long. In fact, the most memorable moment was a friendly exchange with an Indian tourist whose camera fell out of her selfie-stick onto the stone floor. She retrieved it fortunately unharmed. She exchanged some pleasantries with my wife, both clearly pleased to find someone from the same culture in this stridently Christian context. Or perhaps I am reading too much into their instant connection.

Anyway, this had been a distinct if brief shift to spirituality, something in short supply on board.

On returning to the ship and examining our Horizon bulletin of the next day’s events, we saw there’d be a talk on Dalí, some of whose prints were on exhibition in the gallery.

That evening we were glad to hear that our steward’s uncle had let him know that his cousin had been found. He had taken safe refuge in a friend’s house and was alive and well.

Feeling lighter in heart we took to our beds looking forward to hearing more about Dali after breakfast.

Art

The most intriguing fact that came out of the Dalí talk was that he was told by his parents and came to believe that he was the reincarnation of his brother, who died before he was born. I suppose it would intrigue me as I was in a way a replacement for my dead sister, Mary. Too much of that already on this blog.

Other details were less compelling. He met Picasso through Miró and copied his moustache from Valázquez. More illuminating was Dalí’s explanation for his bent clocks. They were apparently inspired by the sight of a melting Camembert, not, as many critics have supposed, by the abstruse metaphysics of time’s recently discovered relativity.

We were pleased to learn that the Dalí prints would be on exhibition in the gallery the following day.

This was to add another world to my growing list. I’d so far gone from the landscape of Clare through the ‘archaeoscape’ of the amphitheatre to the townscape of Lowry: now was to be the turn of a dreamscape, with associations to one of my favourite artists of all time.

I was about to encounter prints of three tributes from among many that Dalí had paid to Goya. I just can’t rate Picasso, whom Dalí had met, as highly as I rate Goya, mainly because the ego is still too obvious in most of his art, as was also the case, I feel, with Dalí.

However, I need to acknowledge that Dalí was the bridge on this ship between Goya and me, and triggered some further mind-expanding processes.

A sales catalogue is the only source I could find for a copy of the picture and an explanation of some of the background to these works of Dalí:

227 years after the birth of Spanish master Francisco Goya, Salvador Dali had an idea to transform Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ and present a new work. Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ was an artistic experiment exposing the foolish superstitions in 18th century Spanish society. Goya described the series as depicting ‘the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual’. The body of work was withdrawn from public sale before their planned release in 1799. Only a formal order from King Carlos IV kept Goya from being called before the Spanish Inquisition. In 1973 Salvador Dali created a metamorphosis of Goya’s suite into a colourful surrealist masterpiece.

Between 1936 and 1939, Spain was going through a civil war with many artists taking sides or going into exile. In 1948 Dalí and Gala, his wife, moved back into their house in Port Lligat, on the coast near Cadaqués. For the next three decades, he would spend most of his time there painting, taking time off and spending winters with his wife in Paris and New York. His acceptance and implicit embrace of Franco’s dictatorship were strongly disapproved of by other Spanish artists and intellectuals who remained in exile.

In 1968, Dalí had bought a castle in Púbol for Gala; and starting in 1971 she would retreat there alone for weeks at a time. By Dalí’s own admission, he had agreed not to go there without written permission from his wife. His fears of abandonment and estrangement from his longtime artistic muse contributed to depression and failing health. Franco died in November 1975.

Dalí’s surrealist version of Goya’s caprichos falls between Gala’s withdrawal and Franco’s death.

When we visited the gallery my attention was held longest on one etching print in particular.

This is the picture at the head of this post: Si no amanece nos quedamos. Goya’s original is rather different: Si Amenece nos vamos.

As I stood before the image in the gallery the first thought that came to mind was of refugees. I thought of traumatised Syrian and Rohingya families fleeing their homeland in desperation. In terms of the original image that Goya created I was probably post-dating it, getting confused with his black paintings, created some 20 years later, after the war with Napoleon, and with Dalí I was taking it back in time to the horrors of the Civil War.

The lady in charge of the gallery came up as I was digesting these slightly inaccurate implications.

‘You’re interested in that one?’ she enquired.

‘I’m finding it interesting to look at and reflect on,’ I replied, careful not to indicate that my interest extended to making the £875 purchase. ‘It’s so evocative of those times in history when people are displaced.’

‘I’m afraid it is. Anyway we’re not selling any of these now, but there’s a special showing tomorrow. What‘s your cabin number?’

I replied without thinking.

‘I’ll send you an invite. It’ll be in your cabin tonight. See you then.’

‘Hopefully.’

It was slowly dawning on me that, although I was standing in what called itself a gallery, it was really a shop. Art has been a commodity since somebody somewhere at some point in history bought the first picture. Nature became one in a big way for certain with the Enlightenment, and without the technological advances which that brought with it, I would not have been on board this ship standing in front of this print. The pains John Clare endured from Enclosure were only a sign of worse things to come.

‘Did the benefits outweigh the costs?’ I found myself asking myself, as we walked away.

I apologise for the poor quality of the versions of these pictures. They’re the best I can find that I feel free to use. I felt it would be useful to pause a moment and reflect on them.

Basically, the figures seem much the same.

Given that Dalí lived in Spain, seemingly complicit with the rule of Franco, it is hard to be sure what he was intending when he revisited Goya’s Caprichos in 1973. Was it only the dream element and not the political that appealed to him?

We have only the change of title to go on, in this case. No dawn for Dalí means staying put, while the dawn for Goya means leaving. I can only guess at what the different implications might be. Dalí’s suggests pessimism and passivity, whereas Goya’s implies hope and action. This conveys to me that it is more dream than politics which stands behind Dalí’s work, whereas, for reasons I’ll go into later, Goya’s work is more a dynamic fusion of the two.

Image scanned from Werner Hofman’s Thames and Hudson ‘Goya.’

Another pointer for me in that direction is the stark difference between image number 79 in both sequences. Goya’s title and subject is Murió la Verdad: Dalí’s is Reflejos de Luna. The images are completely different. Given the times through which Dalí was living, the death of truth was clearly as much an issue as it is now. His evasion of it here seems significant. Passivity and pessimism may indeed have led him to collusion. With Franco not dead yet as he did this work, Murió la Verdad may have seemed a step too far. (Incidentally, I did search the rest of the Dalí catalogue for an equivalent of Goya’s image, in case it had been renumbered, but could find nothing.)

Where next?

Later, I was prompted to look at the life of a poet who took the drastic step of abandoning the religion of his entire family. Whether he did this to avoid execution and to obtain preferment, or out of genuine conviction even at the risk of possible eternal damnation, is a moot point. To be fair, it is perhaps equally difficult to be sure of Dalí’s motives.

In the end though the main point is that this etching sent me back to Goya and a comparison of those other parts of Dalí’s sequence I’ve just mentioned, something I obviously wasn’t able to do till I got back home. None the less it is a legacy of the cruise and therefore an extension of that experience.

The echoes evoked by Dalí may seem from the outside to have spoiled my experience of the cruise even further, but in fact they enriched it. I benefited immensely from my encounter with the Goya/Dalí blend, in fact as much as I did from the sunsets and far more than from the dance floor or the black-tie dinners.

Incidentally, we did go back to the gallery for the special viewing, just to see a fifth print unveiled. It depicted what at first looked like a fish skewered for dinner above a serving dish that looked like a sarcophagus: on closer inspection it was a woman/mermaid – a characteristic product from within the Dalí dreamscape and definitely without a trace of politics that I could detect.

I’ve since tracked it down on a cookery website which stated about two years ago:

This fall, Taschen published a handsome facsimile edition of Les Diners de Gala, a cookbook the artist wrote in 1973 [Apparently the same year as his tribute to Goya’s Caprichos]. Named after his wife, also a legendary gourmand, it’s one of the most unusual recipe books ever created, a bit like Escoffier on acid. Today, signed copies sell for as much as $25,000. I once sat at the New York Public Library for hours, flipping through Dalí’s illustrations of dishes and meals in a kind of terrified thrall. Crayfish towers are topped with the torso of Joan of Arc, her amputated arms gushing blood. Chickens are trussed with barbed wire. A swan, its head chock-full of human teeth, is served on a pastry dish. Dalí is there, too, pictured at the swanky Parisian restaurant Maxim’s, wearing a plush velvet suit, holding a golden scepter, surrounded by a Rabelaisian feast of his own devising.

It was not long before a photo-shoot took place with the gallery director and the proud purchaser of the print standing on either side of it as the cruise photographer recorded the moment for promotional posterity.

Dalí seems to have been in his element as a commodifier of his art, an unenviable skill that escaped Goya when he attempted to sell his Caprichos. That’s one of the reasons why I feel his ego compromised his art. Possibly significantly, my only way of tracing the images we’d seen in the gallery was via sites which involved selling something. The sites I tried which were more focused on art in a slightly purer sense contained not a hint about them. I’m trying hard not to read too much into that.

Next time I will examine a key figure in art that the prints of Dalí in the cruise ship’s gallery pointed me towards. No prizes for guessing who.